Craftsmanship and control are both crafting attributes that FFXIV players need to take into account. Craftsmanship determines how much progress is made by using crafting actions, and control determines how much quality is generated.
As you can see, these attributes have fairly similar effects.
As you craft, you’ll fill the progress bar while decreasing the durability bar.
You’ll also perform actions which increase the item’s quality, which can impact its statistics and worth on the marketboard.
Both of these attributes are important to you if you’re playing one of XIV’s many crafting jobs. But if you’re just getting started, all this jargon might be looking a bit overwhelming.
That’s understandable.
Crafting in XIV is a bit more involved than other MMOs, but it all revolves around one simple concept: to synthesize an item, you have to play a mini-game.
The goal of this mini-game is to get the item’s quality as high as possible, without completely reducing the durability bar.
Should the durability bar reach zero, the item will fail, and you’ll be out the materials you tried to make it with.
It’s a delicate balance, and you’ll need to learn your way around it if you want to be a successful crafter.
Craftsmanship and control both come into this balancing act.
Craftsmanship increases the amount of progress you make by using actions like Basic and Standard Synthesis.
Control increases how much quality is generated by using touch actions like Basic/Standard/Advanced Touch.
Both attributes are important. But they really just play their own parts in boosting your overall crafting performance.
Simply stacking lots of craftsmanship and control via gear upgrades or Materia melding will not make you a master crafter. They’re two parts of a much bigger picture.
Should I Work On Getting More Craftsmanship/Control?
You can boost your craftsmanship/control via two methods:
Upgrading your gear, or melding your gear with Materia.
Is your crafting job currently level capped? If not, don’t bother.
As a general rule of thumb, it’s hardly ever worth melding your gear before you’re at the level cap, or at least approaching it. It’s generally a waste of time and Materia until you know you’re going to be using a piece of gear for quite a long time.
Melding should only really be used to get more out of the best gear you can get at that moment in time.
You can use melds to reach CP thresholds (as long as it can be done cheaply and efficiently) if you’ve reached a bottleneck in your leveling process, but you won’t be worrying about other attributes at that point in time.
What’s More Important: Craftsmanship or Control?
Well, neither, to be totally honest.
The most important stat you should be building on is CP, as this determines on a very raw and obvious level how many actions you can take during synthesis.
Having more CP allows you to take full advantage of your skills and complete powerful rotations to maximum effect.
This has much more of a drastic effect on the quality of your crafts than craftsmanship/control individually.
When you do come to melding, you generally want to prioritize Control over Craftsmanship.
Reason being, you can always use HQ materials to increase your quality baseline to compensate for having less Craftsmanship.
There’s no equivalent for that if you don’t have enough Control.
I Want To Craft For Fun, Do I Need To Worry About Craftsmanship/Control?
It’s completely possible to max out your crafter without paying too much attention to their attributes.
The process might not be as fast, and you may end up sinking more time and resources into the process.
But you will get there eventually.
In my opinion though, it is worth paying attention to these attributes and how they play into your crafting process, even if you’re just crafting for fun.
It’s considerably more enjoyable being able to do something well, even if you’re not aiming at omnicrafting or making millions on the market board.
So paying attention to your CP/craftsmanship/control requirements will give you considerably more options to play with when you craft.
